Korea: Day Two

I will piece this blog together as I have chances. Here's what I have so far!

Welcome to our second day in Korea. I continue to be amazed at the things I'm seeing. We started the day by hopping back on the bus for our gratuitous two hour bus ride. This time we went north to the Demilitarized Zone along the 38th Parallel. At first the experience was very much like I expected it to be. We traveled from a major population base into more and more farm land, we began to see some barracade kinds of equipment in certain places, and then we came to the military check point. We stopped. We waited. The soldiers (machine guns strapped to their backs) came on board and checked our passports and then sent us on our way. We made a hard left next to a sign warning people that this area was filled with landmines, and then we continued on toward the 3rd Tunnel. The 3rd Tunnel is simply one of the tunnels discovered by the South Koreans in the 1970s. They were being dug--well, blasted--by the North Koreans as a way to bring troops in for battle. 70 meters below the surface, the North Koreans blasted into the granite until they were discovered.

Now the tunnels are a bit of a tourist attraction--and a facinating one at that. The tour began with THE most amazing propaganda film I have ever seen. It was over-the-top in its use of music and imagery, and desire to make things seem fine. I wish I had a copy, but all I can give you is a sample. The sample I've included is in Korean, but we saw it in English:



It started out with "frightening" images and ended with images of that same little girl smiling as a computer-generated butterfly touched areas of the computer-generated DMZ landscape and turned it into parks and beautiful green space. By the end of the movie they made it sound like there was absolutely wrong in the DMZ. I presume they just don't want a tourist's video adding to the tension between the North and the South.

More later...